Page 160 of Vow to Claim You

The words echo somewhere distant as though spoken in a language I half understand.

Pregnant. Were. Past tense.

And I already know before he says the rest, I know, because the dream is still pulsing behind my eyes—a little girl with his eyes, walking hand in hand into the dark, looking back at me one last time.

“Before. Did you suspect, and not—” Aric asks, and it’s the most careful I have ever heard him, like the question itself could wound me.

“No.” The word breaks in half. “No. I didn’t know. I was so busy, I thought I was just—I didn’t know, Aric, I didn’t know she was there⁠—”

She.

His eyes close for a fraction.

“Kirill found it in your blood. After.” His voice fractures down the middle; he forces it back together with visible effort. “The trauma. The blood loss. There was nothing he could—” He lets out a breath, forcing himself to finish. “We lost the baby, Ayanna. I’m sorry.”

The world ends quietly. No sound at all. A vast white silence that swallows the pain in my side and the machines and his voice and everything that used to be in me.

She came to tell me goodbye. My grandmother brought her to me so I would have one look at her face. So I would know her name. So I would know she isn’t alone, wherever she’s gone—that she’s held, that someone who loved me is loving her now, in a place I can’t reach.

“Anabella,” I whisper, tears streaming down my temples. “Her name was Anabella. That’s…that’s why she came. To tell me.” My hand drifts to my side, below the bandage, to the place where she was. “She’s with my grandmother, and my grandmother is taking care of her. She wouldn’t leave her alone, Aric, she’d never⁠—”

“I know.” His voice is barely a sound. His thumb moves over my knuckles like he’s anchoring himself to me as much as me to him. “Your grandmother has her, and she’s safe, and she isn’t alone. I believe that. I need you to believe it too.”

I look at him through the blur, and for one moment, something passes between us that has no words—two people standing on opposite edges of the same grave.

“I want to sleep.” I turn my head and squeeze my eyes shut against the tears.

Aric presses his mouth to the back of my hand and holds it there a long moment.

“I’ll be here when you wake,” he whispers.

I let the dark take me, and I am not afraid of it now, because my daughter walked into it, and she’s there, on the other side.

The days after blur into one long gray stretch. I sleep, and wake, and the loss is the first thing waiting for me every time, sitting patiently at the foot of the bed like it never left.

People come and go.

Vidar visited me once. He’s gotten so much worse since I first arrived here. His face is sunken, hair gone from chemo, every breath a struggle. He talks about strength. About how a setback is not a tragedy if you don’t let it become one.

“It was very early,” he rasps. “Barely anything at all. You didn’t even know. It isn’t as though you lost a child, Ayanna.”

I’m not sure whether his intention was to comfort me or smash me, but something in me, far down under the numbness, stings. I don’t argue with him. I don’t have it in me. But when the door closes behind him, tears escape on their own. I lost a child, and no voice on earth will make that smaller than it is.

I was a mother for eight weeks, and her name was Anabella, and I lost a child—a child I would’ve loved with everything I have and everything I am. A child whose voice, or laugh I’ll never know. A child with his eyes and my hair. Half me. Half him. The best of both, made into something new and perfect and ours.

And Vidar calls her barely anything. Then again, I wouldn’t have expected anything else from a man like him.

My parents visit me once too before they leave for Monsera. My father stands at the end of the bed in a dark suit, hands folded, and looks at me with an expression that I’ve never once seen on his face before. While my mother’s brows are creased as she sits next to me, her arms enclosed around me.

“My baby,” she whispers into my hair. “My sweet baby girl.”

I don’t cry. I think I’ve cried all the tears I have, but I hold her and let myself be held as though I’m still a child. And for one moment, I feel something like safe.

“Where is your husband?” My father’s voice cuts through the moment.

I pull back from my mother. “He had a meeting.”

“A meeting.” My father scoffs. “While his wife is barely holding on by a thread.”